Shadow Blessed (The Shadow Accords Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t pointing at him.
    “What are you doing here?” the man asked.
    Carth shook her head. The A’ras had disappeared along the street. Anything she might have thought about doing faded from her mind. “Nothing.”
    “Seems to me that a girl your age with a knife isn’t doing ‘nothing.’ You going to tell me what you thought you might be up to, or do I have to notify the A’ras?”
    She paled. “I didn’t do anything.”
    The man shrugged. “Mayhap not, but they can throw you in the stocks until you answer.”
    Carth’s eyes widened. “They wouldn’t do that.”
    “You sure about that? Girl like you”—he motioned to her light blue dress, now stained from creeping about the city—“looks like you ain’t never seen any real suffering. I think you might be surprised at what will happen until your parents come for you.”
    Carth started sobbing.
    She tried controlling it, tried swallowing back the tears and the sadness and the fear, but she couldn’t. Now that she had stopped, and now that no one seemed to be following her, it spilled from her.
    “Aww, hey, now. I don’t mean to upset you. Thought you might be one of the thieves sneaking off with my potatoes and dried fish.” He stepped back and eyed Carth. “From the looks of you, that don’t seem to be the case. Run along now to your folks and I’ll leave you be.”
    As the man started to turn, Carth sobbed even more.
    He paused and turned back to her. “What is it, girl?”
    She tried stopping the tears, but failed. She took a step back and tripped over the hem of her dress, falling into a puddle of foul-smelling water that only made her cry more. Rather than moving, she wrapped her arms around her legs and cried.
    When the man scooped her up, she didn’t fight. And she didn’t struggle when he carried her down the street. Her parents would have been disappointed. All the lessons they had tried to teach her disappeared in one burst of tears.

3
    A bell tinkled when the man pushed open a door, but Carth still didn’t look up. The man hadn’t carried her far, and she still had her knife. This close to him, she could stab him with it were she to need to, but the man didn’t seem like he wanted to harm her.
    The inside of the building he’d entered smelled of salt and meat and faintly of bread. Carth’s stomach rumbled and she realized that she hadn’t eaten since early in the morning, long before she’d seen her mother lying unmoving on the street.
    At the thought of her mother, she started crying again.
    “Hal, you don’t be bringing any more strays in here.”
    Carth blinked at the sound of a woman’s voice. Through the tears, she saw a wider woman with a long gray robe that brushed the floor. The woman held the long handle of a broom in her meaty fists, but her eyes were soft and warm and the frown on her mouth looked more gentle than angry.
    “Not a stray, Vera. Found this girl outside the tavern. Thought she might be one of the damned thieves keep taking our supplies. Don’t think that’s the case at all. When I mentioned her parents, she got all weepy. Think she might be with the—”
    “Shh,” Vera said, slipping her arms underneath Carth and pulling her away from Hal. “You scared the girl!”
    “Like I said, I thought she was one of the thieves.”
    “You don’t know that there are thieves, Haldon Marchon! More likely, you just forgot to count the boxes right.”
    “I keep my inventory sheets straight. I can tell you whether anything is missing, and I know that there are crates that aren’t accounted for.”
    “And you think this girl is able to drag away one of your crates?”
    “Her?” Hal stood next to Vera and studied Carth. “Mayhap not, Vera. She’s barely any bigger than the crates. I shouldn’t have scared her like I did.”
    “I wasn’t scared,” Carth said softly.
    “What did you say to her that got her all blubberin’ like this? You can be sharp with your tongue, Hal!”
    “You should talk. I